Nektra Advanced Computing Blog

Nektra has released the new WLMailApi v1.0.1, which allows developers to create custom Windows Live Mail plug-ins.

Nektra Advanced Computing is glad to announce the release of the new WLMailApi version 1.0.1 which you can request a download by clicking here. This new version of WLMailApi left the Beta stage and is now an official RTM version.

Creating addons or plugins for Windows Live Mail Desktop® demands a deep knowledge of its internal behavior. Its Application Programming Interface (API) is undocumented and there is not a SDK available. Even the public interfaces IStoreNamespace and IStoreFolder supported in both Outlook Express® and Windows Mail® are not present in this new email client.

Windows 7® will not include Outlook Express or Windows Mail; its users will be forced to move to Windows Live Mail. Your product can be one of the first that plugs in!!!

Contact us to ask any commercial question or use our forum for technical inquiries.

This is the change log from previous version:

* Exiting from the system tray icon’s context menu crashed WLMail
* A stack overflow was produced when many database notifications were triggered
* There was a memory leak when handling database events
* C# DLL Demo solution made WLMail freeze after the evaluation expiration message when it was executed in Debug mode
* First events could get lost at startup before the first folder/message selection change event
* WLMailApi::GetCurrentMessageID() always returned -1 at startup until message selection was changed
* WLMailApi::GetCurrentMessageID() and NktWLMailApi::GetFirstSelectedMessageID() responses were not updated after current/selected message was deleted
* The WLMailApiEvents::OnDatabaseChange NKT_TR_INSERT_MESSAGE case was not triggered when messages were inserted in the Deleted Items folder
* Message.Delete(0) did not work when the message was in the Deleted Items folder
* WLMailApiEvents::OnCurrentMessageChanged event was not triggered if the current message was changed by selecting another message using “Ctrl + Click”
* When an unread message was selected in WLMail and was automatically marked as read, two WLMailApiEvents::OnDatabaseChange events (first NKT_TR_UNREAD_MESSAGE and then NKT_TR_READ_MESSAGE) were triggered instead of just one (NKT_TR_READ_MESSAGE)
* ToolbarButton::SetName and SetTooltip did not work if were called after the button was created
* Message::SaveAsFile() output file was corrupt if Message::GetHeader() was previously called
* Improved and corrected C++ and C# DLL Demos
* The solutions of the package now require Visual Studio 2008

The Nektra staff wishes you all a happy new year!

Best regards,

Nektra’s WLMailApi Team

This week Mozilla launched Firefox 3 officially. It was covered in a couple of sites like:

• It’s Firefox 3 world record download day (techcrunch)
• A Few Firefox 3 Followups (slashdot)

We have released a new version of Cookiepie firefox extension available for download, and we have a number of features and a long wish list from users that we hope can be introduced in next months. Also we are designing some T-Shirts for our Cookiepie fans! More updates will be notified in the Cookiepie mailing list

Cookiepie is one of the favorite Firefox extensions for web developers and users of webmail services like Google Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.Web developers use cookiepie to test their sites.In the past, if a site (e.g. home banking, community site) required extensive testing simulating many different users, the developer needed to open different browsers. Currently all browsers, including Firefox, have just one place to store cookies.Some users of webmail services have more than one web account to log into. People are using each web account for different purposes but they can’t login to the same site at the same time in the same browser.The Cookiepie Firefox Extension is a solution to this problem, as it allows users to log into different webmail accounts on separate tabs. Try it with two or more of your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts.This new release fixes problems experienced in Gmail 2.0, and supports many complex sites like the new Yahoo mail. Even webmail embedded chat is working now!We have made a short video so you can see it in action:

Cookiepie is Free Open Source Software under the GPLv2 license. You can install it now from Nektra Cookiepie site.Please, if you have comments leave them in our group here. We would particularly like to hear about your experience with other sites, such as Facebook. We are making a list of supported websites.

Sebastian Wain from Nektra has submitted CookiePie extension to Firefox Extend Contest with great expectations to be one of the finalists, since it is an innovative piece of software and push beyond the standard capabilities of Firefox. Although it doesn’t came finalist he waited for the announcements to release it publicly without publishing it on Internet until now.Mauro Asprea from Nektra has been contributing on improving user experience.

• What is CookiePie?
  • CookiePie is a firefox extension enabling you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows.

• How I can obtain and use it?
  • Download it from: CookiePie Extension
  • Use the tab context menu to enable CookiePie
  • For example: Toogle CookiePie in three tabs, and login to different GMail account in both.

• Where the idea came from?
  • We need to use it internally at Nektra, and finally decide to publish it for the community.

• What does CookiePie means for the end user?
  • It means that you can for example open multiple GMail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail accounts in different tabs and windows simulteanously.

• What does CookiePie means for web developers?
  • Developers working on Web Software supporting multiple users or profiles can use CookiePie to simultaneusly test their software with each user without needing to open a different browser.

• How CookiePie was made?
  • A first look at the FireFox extensions capabilities let us think this extension was almost impossible to do. One of the limitations was the unconnected parts between http transactions and UI being difficult to correlate an UI to a specific http request/response, more when AJAX/XmlHttpRequest (i.e: GMail) is involved.
  • The work involved mainly short term research and trying to push to the extreme FireFox capabilities without knowing nothing of Mozilla Extensions at the start of development.

• What are the current known limitations:
  • Gecko 1.8.1 has some implementation errors: FireFox store cookies although our http observer changes the response header. This means the common cookies are changed in the FireFox extensions for every transaction on each tab. More information at: Mozilla Bugzilla
  • The reordering of tabs is breaking GMail account opened tabs.
  • GMail has added after we finish this extension, an alert we hope to repair it so GMail doesn’t know about another connection on another tab or window.
  • User may experience problems with another Firefox extensions (for example Tab Mix Plus)

• What are the features we would like to have in the future?
  • Listen to users feedback.
  • Complete Cookie commitment to standards/security
  • Compatibility to another extensions.
  • Add configuration options
  • Enable CookiePie by default
  • Cookies inheritance checkbox: If a user opens a new tab/window from a CookiePie tab, the new opened tab can inherit the cookie container.
  • Cookie pipeline handling: Have a configuration like the Firefox option to choose what cookies needs to be individualized and what cookies needs to be used from the firefox container.
  • Persist/Save/Load Tab Cookies
  • Code: better & cleaner.
  • Testing: Test & Fix in complex scenarios.

• What we suggest for future versions of Firefox?
  • We suggest to have this capability embedded natively on Firefox and not as a third party addin. We know this will involve changing relations between objects in Firefox but it’s an obvious step to do in the browser war.

• What platforms are supported?
  • Currently it ran fine on Windows and Linux. We need to check why Mac is not supported because this software is standard JS code, not platform dependent.

• Finally:
  • Webpage at: Cookiepie
  • You can subscribe directly to our mailing list at Nektra-CookiePie